I used to keep using the boxes whilst steam billowed out the sides until things started crashing.
I recall gcc3 -> 4. The prevailing "wisdom" was emerge --deep (etc) world ... twice! My laptop was left for around a week trundling through 1500 odd packages. I think I did system first, twice too. I left it running on a glass table in an unheated study, propped up to allow some better airflow.
One of the great things about Gentoo is that a completely fragged system doesn't faze you anymore. Screwed glibc? Never mind. Broken python? lol! Scrambled portage? Hold my beer.
I have a VM running in the attic that got a bit behind. OK it was around eight? years out of date. I ended up putting in a new portage tree under git and reverting it into the past and then winding it forwards after getting the thing up to date at that point in time. It took quite a while. I could have started again but it was fun to do as an exercise.
These days my 5950X can get through some of the big scary packages quite rapidly. Firefox is done in about 8 minutes, a new point release of Rust seems to take about 15.
I still haven’t decided whether or not I should be embarrassed that I mainly bought a 16-core CPU to run Gentoo.
Don't be embarrassed, its what computers are for! I've done the same thing recently too. It honestly feels like a better use of a high-core desktop CPU than have it sit idle 99% of the time.
These aren't even close to comparable, and I am very tired of hearing people complain about this!
My current Gentoo system seems to have existed since 03/29/21, so roughly two years now. In the time period, the time spent compiling packages has accumulated to 5 days, and my CPU takes ~140W at max load (Ryzen 3900x).
If I did my math correctly, this comes out to roughly 16KWH accumulated energy across two years.
We can compare this to a gamer, who spends 1 hour per day gaming, for 2 years, on a system that takes 300w while running a game, and this comes out to 230KWH in total. That about 15x as much energy spent by a fairly lightweight gamer on a very average system.
It's also worth noting that the majority of packages build in under 1 minute on my system, the vast majority of compile time is spent on things like Firefox, Rust, GCC and a few more.
This is just a very silly thing to be concerned over, and if we are going to be offended at people for being wasteful there are much larger targets than someone building packages from source.
I remember installing from stage1 on a 1ghz-ish single core. Just something like kde2 would take hours, and that's not even counting the dependencies. Anything bigger than a command line tool was something you'd kick off before going to bed and pray it didn't error. (Spoiler: It almost always did)
I do all world updates overnight for this very reason. But on my R5 3600, the longest emerge is, by far, qtwebengine, which takes just under 1.5 hours. Plus, Gentoo provides -bin versions of many packages notorious for protracted build times, such as Rust, Chromium, Firefox, etc...
-bin seems like a strange thing when you are doing Gentoo, which is all about compile locally. Gentoo has always been about choice and -bin is a choice. However you lose USE flag choice decision with a -bin.
The possible combinations that Gentoo allows looks to me like a sort of Linux immune system in action. Quite a few "unpopular" flags will get used (lol USEd) somewhere by someone that will be more motivated on average to log a bug somewhere.
Gentoo also got the console shell look (colours, fonts etc) right way before any other distro. It's copied widely.
Sure, binary packages don't reduce choice though since they are available in addition to the normal packages (except for stuff that is not open source at all).
Wanting to have control over config via use flags for your system doesn't mean that there aren't packages were you don't really need that. Like if you only use Libre Office a couple times per year on your aging laptop, do you really care enough about the exact USE config to justify compiling it yourself? Even more so if you need it on short notice. Or if you only use Chromium/whatever to check that your website works with that browser but don't actually use it yourself, why bother compiling it.
IIRC there used to be a Gentoo fork (forgot the name) that extended this concept to all packages, so if you used default USE flags you did not need to compile things yourself.
Why did I never think of printing it? I'd open it in lynx on a 2nd framebuffer (I forget the proper term... the things that were like Alt+Shift+an Fkey or something)
College was some good distcc days though. My off campus house all ran Linux and they were dumb enough to distcc me. Debian, RedHat 9 (non rhel), and Slack were the other popular distros at the time. My school was ran on Solaris.
